It’s 6pm at the basement cafe of St Luke’s church in London and the audience is being advised how to behave during the world premiere of Lost in Thought: A Mindfulness Opera. “We ask that you observe silence for four hours,” says our mindfulness guide. “Bring a sense of curiosity and playfulness. Hand in phones and writing materials. You can use the bathroom at any point.”

Vertical time: where mindfulness and music meet

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I scan the room. There are 100 of us – lithe yoga fiends, spiritually questing folk in sensibly loose clothing, uncomfortable aesthetes who look as though they’d rather be at the new production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and a cabal of critics who decline to hand in our notepads. This isn’t – yet – North Korea.

Audience members are handed a postcard that offers a synopsis of the coming evening. Lost in Thought is an opera, but its plot is simpler than The Marriage of Figaro. The card reads: “Sit. Walk. Sit. Eat. Wash up. Sit. Rest. Waking up. Sit. Play. Walk. Chant. Sit. Breaking the silence.” It is suggested we meditate in the next four hours on what it is to sit, what it is to walk, what it is to eat. Part of me wants to run out on to Old Street and meditate on the value of self-liberation.

For ages nothing happens but breathing. Critics complain about the longueurs in Wagner. They know nothing.

One fellow critic writes in her notebook: “Oh God.” But that really isn’t the attitude: yes, some of us are giggly with trepidation, but if we’re going to get anything out of the opera then we should check our inhibiting attitudes, if not critical faculties and notebooks, at the door. Pianist and composer Rolf Hind’s hope is that the music he has written for a soprano and seven-strong ensemble (clarinettist, violinist, cellist, harpist, accordion player, percussionist, pianist) can help structure tonight’s short, silent retreat – ironically, by breaking the silence.

Upstairs, rows of blue yoga mats and orange cushions face musicians’ instruments. We lose our shoes and sit down. Mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg invites us to close our eyes and concentrate on our breathing. “The distracted mind,” she says repeatedly throughout the next four hours, “returns to the breath.” I find this very helpful: distracting thoughts (will I get back for Newsnight? No way I’m washing dishes at the opera) come, but can be sent whence they came on the exhaled breath.

Return to the breath … Lore Lixenberg leads the group meditation in Rolf Hind’s Lost in Thought. Photograph: Simon Jay Price

For ages nothing happens but breathing. Critics complain about the longueurs in Wagner. They know nothing. Perhaps, I think, there are no musicians and this is the emperor’s new clothes with the twist that there’s no emperor. Or maybe, I muse grimly, this isn’t a mindfulness opera at all, but an allegory of how late capitalism transfers work from those who are paid for services to paying punters, as Lynne Truss argues. I banish that distracting thought by concentrating on breathing. What is really happening, of course, is opera is being turned inside out: instead of watching a drama played out on stage, we’re – ideally – attending to our own inner journey.

Then, very slowly, our breathing (some around me are demonstrating their virtuosity in noisy Ujjayi breathing) has a growing accompaniment. A bell (tubular? sleigh? church?) rings out at intervals of perhaps two minutes. Music is doing what it always does – dividing up time – but this time in order to structure our work. Then a violin scratches out a breathing rhythm, joined by a clarinet and an accordion. Lixenberg invites us to open our eyes: the ensemble is now sitting before us working at their instruments, gently helping us to concentrate on breathing.

She invites us to stand and walk. Soon, most of us are walking slowly anticlockwise around the ensemble, slyly checking out their scores, appreciating the weird noises pianist Siwan Rhys is plucking into being from under her lid and wondering why percussionist Sam Wilson has quite so many coloured swizzle sticks next to his playstation.

Everybody is heading in the same direction. Later, the Spectator critic will tell me how it’s just such moments that make her realise how biddable humans are, how easy it is for societies to be herded into totalitarianism. Intriguing point, but we all agreed to this, and will soon be back home to watch rugby highlights, which wasn’t quite what happened in Nazi Germany.

After more seated breathing, we’re invited to hold out our hands with our eyes closed. Something is placed on my hand. A plum? We’re invited to mindfully contemplate its size and temperature, before placing it between our teeth. I bite in, before Lore tells us to. A grape. Disappointing. I appreciate the grape’s taste and texture as I have never done before. Is there any music going on while I do so? I forget – I was mindfully attending to the grape. And that is the problem with the opera – if its function is to make us mindfully attend to the quotidian, to walking, breathing, and the rest, the music is at most ancillary, at worst redundant.

The grape is just the starter. We stand en masse once more and walk to some tables where bowls of the inevitable basmati rice and dal have been laid out. I attend to the flavours and textures of my meal more than I have done for recent curries and listen to the audience symphony of metal forks clicking on china. Then we have to wash up our bowls. As the Spectator critic rightly complains later, this may be communal and mindful, but using the same lukewarm water for 100 bowls is hardly sanitary.

One person seems to be making a noisy fuss of washing up, banging his plastic stick against a bowl. It’s the percussionist, and his rhythm gets taken up by the rest of the ensemble; the piece, I note from glancing at the score, is called Kitchen Dervish. We return to our seats while this plays. It’s perhaps the most traditional part of the evening: we’re listening to music, not mindfully attending to our bodies.

Then, slowly, the lights are dimmed and Lixenberg invites us to close our eyes and rest. It’s the same kind of controlling vibe that you get from cabin crews after dinner on a long-haul flight. I’ve been choosing my own bedtime since I was 37, thanks very much. That said, I was nodding off happily until the woman behind me kicked me in the head. That didn’t happen when I fell asleep during Wozzeck.

… to walking, breathing, and the rest, the music is at most ancillary, at worst redundant.

Perhaps 15 minutes later we’re walking in circles again. What are those strange, otherworldly sounds? Are they coming from the accordion? No, the mindfulness leaders are handing out swizzle sticks to wave above our heads. One is given to me. I can’t tell you how happy I am, twirling and walking, walking and twirling, making a sound like the owl of Minerva hooting wisely in the twilight of its existence. Possibly. Then a mindfulness leader approaches me as I walk, and suggests with an eloquent eyebrow that I surrender the swizzle stick to someone else. I do and feel intensely not just the pleasure of giving, but the pain of loss. I loved that swizzle stick and the noise it made.

Again, we’re all walking anticlockwise as directed by Lixenberg – except, that is, for one man who walks clockwise. It’s Rolf Hind, who looks like he’s more mindful than the rest of us put together. Nice touch, maestro.

Lixenberg intones the only words in the libretto.

I surrender the swizzle stick. I do and feel intensely not just the pleasure of giving, but the pain of loss

“I have lived on the lip / of insanity, wanting to know reasons / knocking on a door. It opens. / I’ve been knocking from the inside.”

Then she’s standing face-to-face with the percussionist and repeatedly singing these words mantra-like to the rhythm he sets up by rubbing two wooden blocks together. In an evening already filled with mysteries, I wonder how he gets that sound (sandpaper?) and why Lixenberg is singing so close to his face, reminding me unfortunately of Freddie Mercury cod-ecstatically shouting We Will Rock You while invading the drummer’s personal space. Not for the first or last time tonight I let distracting thoughts go and return to my breathing.

‘Soon, most of us are walking slowly anticlockwise around the musicians, slyly checking out their scores.’ Photograph: Simon Jay Price

The words she sings are from Rumi and fit with the proselytising tenor of the opera. If we are driven to the lip (weird) of insanity by modern frenetic living, by the manifold distractions of putatively enabling gizmos (our silenced phones now immobilised in the cloakroom, in particular), then we have it within ourselves to reverse from the edge. That, I guess, is what mindfulness is about. Contemplate the grape in its phenomenological beauty, not your Twitter followers. Or something like that.

The transfer of work from musician to audience continues in the last hurrah of the opera. After a frenetic passage in which the rhythms of the ensemble give way to chanting, the musicians mingle with us, relying only on their voices. We are wordlessly invited to join in the chant. I’m bashful. How does it go again? The way I’m chanting is more “Pooh Bear tiddily pom” than “om mani padme hum”. But at least it’s a start. And this seems to be how the opera ends, not with us sobbing over the death of a consumptive courtesan, but shoeless in London singing out of tune while the musicians look on as benignly as they can manage.

The opera ends with us shoeless singing out of tune while the musicians look on as benignly as they can manage

There is, though, a coda. The musicians hand out objects and invite us to make percussive noises – bang two plastic forks together, scratch cushion fabric with fingernails in time to some gathering rhythm. Lore is suddenly among us gargling water from noisy counterpoint to scratched cushion covers. Audience members start to get rambunctious as the clattering rhythm quickens, like overtired toddlers at the end of an overextended play date. A giggly cushion fight breaks out.

At every kids’ party I’ve ever presided over, I’ve had two feelings: one that this could go Lord of the Flies at any moment and, two, that I wish I’d brought my book. I have those feelings now. Thankfully, it is the end of the opera. The musicians start chatting to themselves and us. We are back in the verbal world of infinite distraction.

As I unchain my bike from churchyard railings, it’s 10.15pm, I’m feeling rested, calm, serene – but also, like Martin Luther King, free at last. Does the mindfulness inculcated by opera make one a more attentive road user or just a zoned-out liability? Frankly, I don’t know, but certainly, until that coda with its retro-East German-holiday-camp-cum-group-mind-meld mood of compulsory fun, I found the experience offered by Lost in Thought oddly touching, inspiring and, like life itself, absurd.

Lost In Thought will next be performed at the Lowry in Salford next month. I recommend you go along. You have nothing to lose but your inhibitions, shoes and mobile phones, and then only for a few hours.